She was teaching a high school class of refugees in Saskatoon, teens who had fled with their families from a war-stricken region of Europe. The teens had much to learn. So, it turned out, did their teacher.

One girl was afraid of everything. She was finally convinced to get on a bus for a field trip, but once she was on, she wouldn’t get off. She wouldn’t go to the cafeteria for lunch. A Canadian-born student touched her and she jumped, yelling at the other kid.

“I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” Geres said from her classroom at Mount Royal Collegiate. In 1999, she has been hired to teach the class of refugees at Walter Murray Collegiate. These students were signed up for school on the date of registration, catching by surprise the public school division, the school and the teacher whose job it became to bring some order to their lives.

“I couldn’t understand, why is this girl so afraid of everything? They told me their stories; sometimes I would just cry. Their stories were so horrendous, soldiers or the military coming to their village and they would run to the mountains and hide and they came back and they’d find their relatives dead.

“This girl said she had to keep a gun because people would come into her house and steal her stuff. She’s a teenager and she’s talking about carrying a gun.

“That year changed my life. Holy cow, that was a really challenging year,” Geres said.

The experience changed her, but the students who found themselves in her classrooms in the years that followed were the beneficiaries.

Jenny Neal has volunteered to work with Geres two mornings a week since 2008 at Mount Royal.

“What impresses me most about her is that every single student there she’s like a mother to,” Neal said. “She goes way beyond just teaching them English or whatever, things like if a child doesn’t know how to get to school — some newcomers have nobody to help them — she will make sure the kid knows how to get on the bus. It’s just things like that.

“Yesterday, she was taking one student to the food bank because they didn’t know how to get there. That’s the kind of thing she does all the time. She looks after them and worries about them.”

Geres was raised in Neiburg, a small town west of Saskatoon near the Alberta border. After high school she came to Saskatoon, working in child care, at nursing homes and at Camp Easter Seal. She became a single parent and went to university, receiving her BEd. She taught at La Loche in 1994-95, then came back to the U of S to work on a master’s in educational technology, using computers to learn English, which she finished in 2001.

In the meantime, those 17 teens arrived on registration day for high school in 1999. Geres was hired to teach them, in part because she was studying in the area of computer-assisted language learning. She also had a certificate in teaching English as a second language.

At the time, not too many people in education circles talked about trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorders, she says.

“They were kids who came with huge challenges because they had left their country so fast. One girl said the soldiers came to her house and they were ordered to leave and she said they left the tea on the table. To me that was such a profound statement that that’s how quickly they had to leave. So it was terrible.

“They just had so many issues because they had left so quickly. They’d been in a war situation, violence, domestic or civil unrest. They’d been persecuted because of their religion and ethnicity. So it took them quite a while to settle and to figure out where they belonged in this society.”

By the following year the teens knew more English, but many of the older students had left, going back to their homeland. The students who remained were integrated with other students, and some began to talk about their first year in school, what they felt worked and what should have been done differently. For example, some said they should have been mixed in with the school population from the start.

“I thought, I should write this down,” said Geres. “I thought I really need to go back to school and figure out what’s going on.”

She got a grant from the Stirling McDowell Foundation and started work on an interdisciplinary PhD at the U of S, studying in the areas of psychology, sociology and education. The participatory action research project looked at youth who were forced to move and had their education disrupted.

“I had time to think, to think about what I had seen and to read and to go to conferences and talk. It was a good opportunity for me to figure out what I had seen, and it’s trauma, it’s all about trauma, that those kids had seen horrific things and it doesn’t just go away by them being here and we’re saying, ‘It’s safe here. It’s OK, you’re safe now.’

“That doesn’t work, that doesn’t help. They have to work through those issues, express them. Some kids need to tell, some kids just need to work it out physically, but it doesn’t just go away.

“I learned along the way that I had experienced secondary trauma from all the stories that they told me. After that first year I was totally burnt out, absolutely, totally exhausted. So I had to learn how to look after myself, too.”

Koreen Geres in her classroom at Mount Royal Collegiate.Girard Hengen /
The StarPhoenix

• • •

Mount Royal is the perfect spot for her, she says. There is a high refugee population, and she feels she can use her experiences to help students, and her teaching colleagues, adjust.

Kids are divided by language level and come into her classroom to learn, but they don’t just sit at a desk. For the beginners’ group, the learning is hands-on. They’ll take two weeks of art, two weeks of cooking, then electronics or woodworking. They are learning names and the language, just not from a book.

A community garden was started a couple of years ago, and it has flourished, noted Jenny Neal, the volunteer helper.

“It has been really helpful for students, a lot of them are new to the country, they are successful in the garden and some of them love to be out there. It’s done a lot for the community. Some community members not connected to the school are involved in the garden. It’s become a real focus for the community,” Neal said.

Many of the recent refugees at the school fled Syria, doing what they could to survive while waiting for a chance at a new life whether in Canada or elsewhere. Geres notes one of the first issues with people coming to Saskatoon from Syria was finding good, affordable housing. Some had to move within months of arriving, either on their own or because their rental accommodations were in bad shape.

Many of the students from Syria have done well, even though some had been out of school for three or four years. While girls usually went to schools wherever they were, boys had to work to make money for the family.

“The girls were able to adjust to school a little easier,” Geres said. “But for a young boy who’s out of school for four years, he’s been working, he’s been active and then we ask him to come in here and sit down and do what he’s told. That is so hard.”

She says a different program would help students like that, perhaps a trade program that also teaches English. The kids want to be in school, but some can’t adjust. They can be at a high school until they are 22, but their education has been interrupted.

“How can they possibly graduate by the time they’re 22? They’re learning English, they’re learning content and it’s not just the Syrians. We see this all the time with refugees.

“If they arrive with minimal English, they haven’t been in school much, so this whole idea of studying and learning and taking home your books and looking after paper is all new. And if they haven’t had math, math is a huge stumbling block for so many kids … they just can’t get caught up.”

Anwar Tesfamariam was able to catch up. Born in Eritrea, he came to Saskatoon via Sudan at the age of 16, landing in Geres’ class when she taught in the mid-2000s at Walter Murray Collegiate.

“She’s a wonderful teacher and she guided me through everything. I was new to the school and she helped me through it,” he said. “She’s like a mother to me, a mentor and a mother.

“She is an amazing person, not just for me but for a lot of people.”

After high school, Tesfamariam enrolled in a course in mining engineering, but he postponed his studies two years ago to look after an aunt and nephews. Geres was a signatory to the sponsorship agreement under which his family came to Saskatoon. Tesfamariam says he received help settling into a new country, and he thought he should do the same for his family. Geres taught him to pay a good deed forward.

“I learned that I had to pass it to someone else. That’s one of the things I learned from Ms. Geres.”

There have been successes and there have been challenges. Through it all Geres perseveres.

“I’ve learned to toughen up a little bit, and I’ve learned that I can’t change the past. There’s nothing I can do about the horrible things that happened to that kid. I can do my best to help them, give them the skills that will keep them strong and focus on what they can do rather than what they can’t do.

“They’re amazing kids, oh my gosh they’re amazing kids. They’re so kind and I love making home visits, going to somebody’s house and of course they always feed me and they’re so kind and thankful. How many Canadian kids would want their teacher to go home with them?”

Amira Ammari and Koreen Geres celebrate World Refugee Day put on by the Saskatoon Refugee Coalition at City Hall in June.Michelle Berg /
Michelle Berg

• • •

Koreen Geres’ professional work spills over into her personal interests. An advocate for peace, she is also a member of the Saskatoon Refugee Coalition and is completing her second year as chair of the board of International Women of Saskatoon (IWS).

She started volunteering at IWS in 1995, after she had returned to Saskatoon from La Loche. Unemployed and feeling down, she was welcomed “like the most important person on the face of the Earth,” she says.

One of her goals is to create a home for young single refugee mothers to give them support and help them get on their feet and on their way in Canada. She remembers a teen girl who left Eritrea with a cousin and friends. The girl walked across the mountains to Ethiopia, but was caught by soldiers. The older kids were led by hand.

“The soldiers said to her, ‘You can walk by yourself you’re just a little girl,’ and she took off, and she was in the mountains of Ethiopia by herself. A tiger stalked her and she hid behind a rock until it went away.”

The girl found some people from her community, and a marriage was arranged with a much older man to ease her passage to Canada. When in Saskatoon, the relationship turned abusive, the couple left the province and she got pregnant. One day she phoned to say she was coming back — with just her newborn.

“I asked, ‘Who is picking you up from the bus?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Where are you going to live?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ”

Geres picked her up, and with nowhere to stay, took the girl and her daughter in for a couple of weeks. An apartment and some belongings were found for her.

“The first night she said to me, ‘Ms. Geres, if you want to sleep here tonight you can. You can sleep on the couch.’ And I was so tired … I just wanted to go home. It wasn’t until later I thought she didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t even notice. I felt so terrible I was just thinking of myself.”

Over the years Geres has watched the resilient young woman make it on her own, busing to school and child care and back every day, even taking overnight shifts cleaning at Superstore while others looked after her daughter. Over the years Geres has also come to believe Saskatoon needs a house for four or five women in similar situations, with a live-in mentor who would run programs and give guidance to the single mothers.

“Why don’t we have a house so people don’t have to work the night shift at Superstore, so they can help each other with child care right there, they don’t have to shelp that baby out in the wintertime and we could have child care that would be like the Head Start program and get these kids off to a really strong start?”

Geres has pitched the idea to the IWS board, and hopes to make progress on a home soon. Meanwhile, she still has her classroom, where she is making a difference in the lives of people who come to Saskatoon just looking for a home, peace and a fresh start.

“Her contributions have been really amazing particularly to the newcomers to this province,” said Neal. “The total concern for anybody who is new, down and out, troubled — that’s the kind of person she will help.”

Geres says, modestly, that what she offers the community is bringing people together. A Prairie Prism cultural event was held in early October at Mount Royal, at her suggestion. It was an exchange of people, ideas and cultures.

“We need to get people into our school. We need to get our students out into the community and build those bridges. That’s what I like to think I do.”

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